Japan’s exchange operator briefly halted trading in Nikkei stock futures Monday morning as global markets plunged in reaction to President Donald Trump‘s sweeping new tariff policies.

What Happened: The “circuit breaker” system triggered a 10-minute pause in trading at 8:45 a.m. Tokyo time after Nikkei 225 futures fell more than 8%. The mechanism, designed to prevent panic selling during extreme volatility, affected several futures contracts before trading resumed.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 plummeted 5.73% to 31,844.68 by late morning local time, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index crashed 8.81% to 20,837.30, extending last week’s global selloff that wiped out approximately $6 trillion in U.S. market value.

U.S. futures indicated further pain ahead, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 3.26%, S&P 500 futures falling 3.73%, and Nasdaq-100 futures plunging 4.60% Sunday evening.

“I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said on Sunday, showing little concern over the market reaction and adding that foreign governments would need to pay “a lot of money” to lift the tariffs.

"The only real circuit breaker is President Trump's iPhone," said Sean Callow, senior FX strategist at ITC Markets in Sydney, according to Reuters. However, there's little sign the market turmoil is enough to deter him from the tariff agenda he's championed for decades, according to Callow.

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Why It Matters: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the administration’s stance, attributing the selloff to overvalued technology stocks rather than tariff policy. “This isn’t about tariffs, it’s about a dose of reality in the AI space,” Bessent claimed, calling it “more a MAG Seven problem than a MAGA one.”

The semiconductor sector has been particularly devastated, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF tumbling 17% last week — its worst performance since the 2001 dot-com crash.

The market turmoil has prompted warnings from financial experts. CNBC host Jim Cramer drew parallels to the 1987 “Black Monday” crash, noting a similar pattern of consecutive down days before a potential cliff-edge decline.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, despite supporting Trump in the 2024 election, urged the president to pause the tariff implementation for 90 days to allow negotiations, warning of an “economic nuclear winter” if current policies continue.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.